Eduardo Chillida

The work of Eduardo Chillida (San Sebastián, 1924-2002) constitutes a legacy of ineluctable reference in the artistic panorama of the twentieth century. His monumental sculptures, influenced by oriental art, achieve a knowledgeable balance between form and emptiness, between the material and the spiritual, using such materials as soil, iron, steel, granite, and light. This sculptor’s graphic work shows this same relation with space via surfaces of dense blackness in counterpoint with the original emptiness of the paper. His creations are found in more than 20 museums in the world and very especially in the Chillida-Leku (Chillida-Space), the large, open-air museum that the artist inaugurated in September 2000. He has received almost all the prizes that exist, from the Biennale di Venezia to the Kandinsky, from the Wilhem Lehmbruck to the Príncipe de Asturias, from Germany’s Kaiserring to Japan’s Imperial Prize. Poets and thinkers such as Octavio Paz, Gabriel Celaya, José Ángel Valente, Gaston Bachelard or Martin Heidegger have all written of the great importance of his work.